Real-Time Marketing Techniques

"Walk me" tours don’t work. Not even when they’re three steps long (most definitely not when they’re ten). I've seen products *improve* their engamenet by ripping them out! Why? Well, they make the product seem overly complicated, increase load times, and let’s be real, they’re just a band-aid for bad UX/UI. There, I said it. You know what does work? Contextual, timely in-app notifications and messaging. Those timely pop-ups that highlight a feature or offer help - these have potential of doubling your engagement (just imagine being able to real-time offer help to rage-clicking users.) But implementation always feels impossible - usually, this would take two sprints' worth of work (if you're lucky) and be at least two months away from 'launch' - and thats for one (!) in-app notification. Oh and if you want it to be real-time, just forget it. So you can understand why I’m so excited about Amplitude’s latest release: now, you can use data inside Amplitude (aka cohorts) to trigger in-app notifications, in real-time, *all powered by Amplitude* (yes, even in-app notification part!). They can do tours, checklists, surveys, or announcements! No 3rd party products (which lack data) or rigid home-grown systems needed. This is a game changer 😍. Real-time data + self-serve UI + in-app notifications = pure magic. My personal favorite? The rage-click cohort, of course. That’s some chef’s-kiss level targeting right there. 🔥 So excited for all products out there to *actually* get better now. Lets goooo! Read more about it here: https://lnkd.in/e-5sNZPH #growth

Red Bull's marketing strategy will be studied for decades. The energy drink company spends 3x more than its competitors on advertising — 30% of annual sales compared to 10% of annual sales. But more importantly, rather than just doing traditional advertising, Red Bull owns several sports assets — the Red Bull F1 team, global soccer clubs, a hockey team, etc. — and focuses almost exclusively on *creating* history. Examples include: • Skydiving from space • Snowboarding from helicopters • Building custom skate parks in the sky • Flying planes upside down (through a tunnel) These stunts are unique and get millions of impressions on social media, with Red Bull's latest marketing stunt serving as the perfect example. Red Bull spent 18 months working in unison with Prada — to market the company's activewear line — and X-Games gold medalist Dawid Godziek to pull off the world's first bike backflip on a moving train. The final product is incredible — and Godziek finishes in the same place he started! ** If you enjoy learning about the business and money behind sports, join 125,000+ others who read my 3x weekly newsletter: http://readhuddleup.com/ #sports #marketing #sportsbiz #linkedinsports

Cleartrip won Contextual Marketing game! Other brands fighting for "End of Year" sales. #Cleartrip is selling us 2026. I saw this ad in The Economic Times today, It’s a masterclass in understanding customer psychology, at least how I see it. Here's why: - The Simplicity: Stripped away 320+ days of the year. By showing only the days that matter - the long weekends, they’ve reduced the cognitive load for a busy professional. - The Anticipation: Marketing isn’t always about immediate conversion. By helping people visualize their 2026, Cleartrip occupies mental real estate before the holiday planning even begins. - The Utility: Instead of a generic Book Now CTA, they provide a QR code to sync a Long Weekend Tracker on their calendars. It moves from being an "ad" to being a "tool" - The Timing: Published on a Saturday morning. This is exactly when their target audience is sipping coffee and dreaming of their next getaway. Cleartrip isn't selling tickets here; they’re selling ideas to take a break Don't just sell a product. Sell the solution to a problem your customer hasn't even started stressing about yet. What do you think? Does it attract you and make you think? #Marketing #Advertising #2026

If you’re in PR and not paying attention to what AI is doing to search and news, you’re in for a rude awakening. AI-powered search isn’t just “tweaking the game”— it’s in the process of rewriting the rules. From how publishers decide whether to allow AI to crawl their content, to how your clients or company get discovered, this shift will change the way PR pros operate in 2025 and beyond. AI-powered search will reshape how companies and clients get visibility—and PR pros need to adapt quickly. Here’s what’s happening, why it matters, and how you can stay ahead: 1️⃣AI Search Engines Are the New Gatekeepers: Tools like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s SearchGPT prioritize aggregated content from trusted publications over individual websites. Your beautifully optimized website? Irrelevant if AI search decides it’s not worth surfacing. 2️⃣Publishers Deciding If They’re In or Out Big outlets like The New York Times and Wired are currently opting out of AI crawlers to protect their IP, while others allow it for traffic. This means PR pros need to strategically target outlets that feed AI models—because your story only gets told on the likes of SearchGPT if the outlet carrying it is in the AI ecosystem. 3️⃣PR Is Even More Crucial for the ‘New’ SEO: Placement in trusted media is no longer just about audience reach; it’s about ensuring AI search engines authentically and accurately pick up your client or company’s narrative. Strong media relationships will be the difference between AI surfacing your story—or perhaps leaving your brand out of the conversation, or even worse, misconstruing it. 4️⃣Crises Are on a New And Faster Clock: AI prioritizes recency and credibility, so your crisis response needs to be swift, transparent, and authoritative. A slow or ineffective reaction could leave misinformation embedded in AI models, compounding damage to your brand’s reputation. 5️⃣ What PR Pros Need to Do Right Now: Focus more on media outlets that AI trusts: Build deeper and non transactional relationships with publications and reporters already working with AI search to ensure your stories are seen. Closely Monitor AI trends: Stay ahead of updates in tools like Gemini, SearchGPT, and Perplexity so you can adjust strategies as more info emerges. Be proactive with publishers: Understand which outlets are allowing AI crawling and how that impacts your clients’ visibility. This is going to change rapidly in the coming months. The bottom line: AI search isn’t just changing how people find information—it’s going to force PR practitioners to immediately rethink how we interact with media, manage crises, and position brands for discovery. This is an underrated but important trend that will accelerate in 2025 and beyond. Anything I’m missing here? Please put in comments.

Decathlon chose to zoom in (literally) and take a different perspective. Their “Choose Your Way” campaign doesn’t push product features or promotions. Instead, it invites you in through close-up, tactile moments that make you feel something. These are memory triggers. Emotional cues. It’s simple, sensory and surprisingly powerful. A reminder that the most effective creative work doesn’t just show what something is. It makes you feel something about it. This shift didn’t come out of nowhere. Last year, Decathlon rebranded and it marked the beginning of a new chapter for a brand that had always been big, but rarely emotional. This campaign builds on that foundation. It shows what happens when you stop trying to say everything and focus instead on creating a feeling. You don't have to lead with product to make people care. You just need to show up in a way that resonates. Other brands are doing this too. British Airways rolled out its “A British Original” campaign with eye-catching out-of-home executions that use minimal branding and focus on expressions of wonder from people gazing out of plane windows. PepsiCo also nailed it with work that zoomed in on their logo hidden in plain sight on other brand packaging. A smart, subtle flex. It's all about shifting the perspective and zooming in to bring something visually interesting to life. What brand have you seen recently that made you feel something without saying too much?

The most powerful sales tool isn’t a spec sheet — it’s a live demo. What do you think about this one? Across industries, the data is overwhelmingly clear: 🔹 67% of enterprise buyers say seeing a product in action is the #1 factor influencing their decision. 🔹 Demos shorten sales cycles by 30–50%, especially for complex solutions like servers and GPU-accelerated workloads. 🔹 In assistive tech—like mobility or handicap-support chairs—real-world demonstrations boost customer trust by 70%, because impact is immediately visible. 🔹 For AI/HPC hardware, customers who see workload performance live are 3× more likely to move forward compared to those who only receive documentation. Why? Because visibility removes uncertainty. A demo translates complexity into clarity. It turns “theory” into tangible value. Whether it’s: ⚡️ a next-gen server showing real performance under load, 🧠 a GPU pipeline speeding up an AI workload in real time, or ♿️ an assisted mobility chair transforming someone’s daily life… Seeing the product in action closes the gap between curiosity and commitment. This is the difference between telling and showing — and that gap is where conversion happens. #Innovation #Technology #HPC #AI #GPU #Servers #DataCenter #TechLeadership #Innovation #CustomerExperience #AIInfrastructure #AccessibilityTech

Your competitor isn't better at marketing. They're just faster. Trust me when I say this, URGENCY IS EVERYTHING. You might've seen Rahul Dua's latest stand-up set on skincare being a scam. My team at Monk-E saw it too and immediately thought - let's get him and a skincare brand on board and capitalize on this moment. The next day, Rahul and his wife, Nidhi are in our studio shooting a video for Pond's. One thing to remember - moving fast doesn't mean doing things for the sake of it. That's uninspiring and unintentional. The video picked up exactly where his rant left off - those impossible-to-pronounce ingredient names became the setup for Nidhi to school him and showcase Pond's latest innovation. It played off their chemistry and banter that audiences have always loved, and it turned a joke into genuine brand conversation. This is what urgency looks like: Planned, produced, and delivered within 24 hours. All in-house. Without it feeling random. The brands that win turn opportunity into execution before the moment passes. Timing over perfection. Always.

🚨Breaking🚨 Amazon just turned Rufus into an agent. Every AI shopping assistant waits for you to ask. Amazon just stopped waiting. Amazon rolled out 'Scheduled Actions' in Rufus last week. It offers a handful of suggested use cases to get shoppers started, and the one I clicked on for the video below was "Set a birthday reminder with gift ideas." Sounds boring, but it's actually quite a bit shift in capability. Gift discovery is one of the biggest use cases driving people to ChatGPT and other general-purpose LLMs for shopping help. "What should I get my brother-in-law who likes cycling and hates gadgets" is exactly the kind of query Amazon can't afford to lose to OpenAI. Scheduled Actions does two jobs at once: it pushes Amazon further into agentic commerce, and it builds a moat around many of retail's most lucrative, most AI-native categories. Scheduled Actions lets Rufus act on a schedule instead of only responding to live queries. Amazon's other starter suggestions include monthly coffee recommendations, new book alerts, and automated cleaning supply restocks. But the suggested prompts aren't the story. They're training wheels. The real shift is that shoppers can define their own. 🗣️ Remind me to buy running shoes every 18 months. 🗣️ Alert me when the price on [specific product] drops below $X. 🗣️ Send me a new hot sauce every fortnight. 🗣️ Remind me about pet food before it runs out, based on the pack size. 🗣️ Suggest new swimwear before the kids outgrow them. Amazon just handed shoppers a programmable layer over their own commerce life. Why the birthday example is an intersting one: 🛒 Gift-giving is one of the highest-intent, most brand-agnostic queries in commerce. "Gift ideas for mum" doesn't care whose brand ranks, it cares about fit. 🛒 Birthdays are recurring and predictable. Amazon now has a calendar of future purchase intent, not a guess. 🛒 It captures relationship data Amazon didn't own before. Who matters to you, their age, what you bought last year, what they actually liked. 🛒 It moves discovery off Google and ChatGPT and into Amazon's own interface, where the shelf is stocked and checkout is one tap. For brands, this rewrites the brief. If your product isn't in Amazon's logic for specific occasions, usage patterns, replenishment cycles, and relationships, you don't get scheduled. Structured attributes stop being a hygiene factor and become the entire shelf. For retailers, the warning is sharper. Every scheduled action Amazon captures is a future purchase locked in before anyone else gets to pitch. No ad auction. No comparison tab. No competing retailer even in the room - it's definitely time to begin exploring your own conversational assistant. The interesting question isn't which use cases Amazon suggests💡 It's what shoppers will invent once they realise Rufus can just do it for them 🤔

In retail, many chase the next big thing—a new style, a new way to reach consumers—triggering a frantic race to adopt. But most trends fade as fast as they appear. The real game-changers are curated habits that prove they can stand the test of time. I’ve championed social commerce as the future of retail for over a decade. In hindsight, that barely scratches the surface. It’s now a deeply ingrained consumer behavior. The imperative isn’t just to adopt it, but to evolve with it—constantly and intentionally. At HSN, social commerce was core to our strategy. We pioneered the blend of shopping and entertainment. That’s the essence: finding the sweet spot where entertainment, connection, and commerce converge. Soon after, platforms like Twitch began enabling users to both game and shop in real time, blending entertainment with commerce. Fanatics has successfully leaned into this model as well, immersing fans in live experiences while showcasing gear in action, often worn by their favorite athletes and community, turning fandom into a powerful trust signal. More recently, TikTok Shop collapsed the purchase funnel into a single scroll. It's no longer discover, then buy. Now, it’s see it, want it, buy it—seamlessly, in-platform. So, as we look ahead, how do I see this "social commerce habit" evolving? Here's what I expect: 🔹 Creator Integration is Non-Negotiable. For Gen Z, in particular, TikTok Shop has become a primary discovery engine. They trust their favorite creators to genuinely try products and offer honest feedback. The more brands lean into authentic partnerships with creators, the more trust they build in this integrated shopping experience. It’s about relationship-driven commerce. 🔹 Embrace a Zero-Click World. Speed and simplicity are paramount. Consumers need to be able to see, buy, and receive as fast as humanly possible. This means minimal clicks, minimal friction, and no moments for reconsideration. It's about instant gratification and removing all barriers between desire and ownership. 🔹 Elevate Live Shopping. This is a powerful return to the personal connection and real-time interaction that defined the best of traditional retail. Shoppable videos and live sessions transform social media into a personalized shopping aisle. Imagine experts demonstrating products, showing how they fit or can be styled, all in real-time, tailored to your interests. It brings humanity back to digital retail. 🔹 Unlock the Power of Virtual Try-Ons. A longstanding hurdle in e-commerce is "try before you buy." AI-enabled virtual try-on features solves that, making online shopping more immersive and convenient. This translates directly into higher conversion rates, deeper engagement, and customers spending more valuable time interacting with your brand digitally. It’s time to stop treating social commerce like a trend. This is commerce, full stop. It’s a fundamental consumer behavior that belongs at the center of every modern retail strategy.

Marketing brain is 24/7. Its a curse 😂 This question kept our marketing team up for months "How can we improve our sponsor experience?" One simple q during our all hands We all hyper focused on it It lived rent free in our heads Which is the beauty of marketing But also the curse haha Once you get INCEPTION, you cant shake an idea So we went to work thinking through everything we could to level up our sponsor experinece for all our brand partners who are often investing $ six figure amounts. The creative burden of this question led us to revamp our entire sponsor experience, starting with dashboards. This ended up being the biggest driver of sponsor NPS. Real time registration dashboards for sponsors. That we now run with this 4 step flow. Here's how it works 👇 Step 1: Real time registrant enrichment As attendees register, we automatically enrich each profile using Clay, Clearbit, and internal logic. This gives us a live data set with firmographics, technographics, company size, title level, and geography. Step 2: Sponsor facing filters Each sponsor can view the dashboard through their own lens: Want to break down VP+ titles in financial services? Filter. Want to see companies with 200 to 1,000 employees? Filter. Want to segment by RevOps tools in the stack? Filter. Step 3: Weekly summary reports Every Friday, sponsors receive an email with three key indicators: 1. New registrants 2. ICP match rates 3. RSVP velocity Step 4: Mid flight upgrade triggers If a spike in target accounts shows up two to three weeks before the event, we give sponsors the option to upgrade in real time. That might include adding things like: Extra 1:1 meeting rooms Booking a sponsored dinner slot Adding a breakout or session bump -- My final 0.02 for you The best marketing takes obsession When you obsess over the customer experience like this, you're bound to come up with at least a few winning ideas. Even if you have a few clunkers a long the way. So set a high standard for 10X ideas inside your org and give people the space to take big swings, not just small optimizations of your current state. Marketing brain is a beautiful thing (even if it drives us crazy along the way 😂)